Here are two links that my boss sent to me-- he created a spreadsheet that uses the formulas described there. The spreadsheet tells me that I need 27 people (22 more than I currently have). http://www.aztea.org/resources/whitepaper/staffing.htm http://techguide.merit.edu/formula.htm I found the formulas to be "too heavily" weighted for hardware, and not heavily weighted enough for software (but it's a starting point). -ron

-----Original Message----- From: Leo Bicknell [mailto:bicknell@ufp.org] Sent: Friday, October 05, 2001 9:16 AM To: Murphy, Brennan Cc: 'Dave O'Shea'; Irwin Lazar; nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: staffing guidelines

On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 07:27:56PM -0500, Murphy, Brennan wrote:

...

I am interested more in how many *engineers* are needed on 200, 500, 2000 device networks, where "device" means routers, switches and any servers that support the routers/switches such as HP Openview, Sniffers or ACS servers, ...Firewalls, etc.

That's rather like asking how many cars a mechanic can service. At Jiffy Lube it's 100's a day. At Ford it's 10's a day. At the Ferrari shop it might be one a day. Race teams might devote several mechanics to one car for days at a time.

I can invision networks of 2000 devices that one engineer runs, and networks of 200 devices that require 2000 engineers. There is very little to link the number of devices to the number of people needed to run them. The time people spend is dominated by rate of change, rate of failure, scope of work, redundancy of design, and the level of support you want to offer. The time spent installing devices, or upgrading them is rather small in most networks.

-- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440 Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org